OpenAI’s DALL·E 2
— generates AI art from text at 4x the previous resolution with more accuracy; see the paper for more examples #
Parker Molloy’s experiments with Midjourney, a new AI art generator
— I've also been playing with the beta and the results are astounding #
Comparing what TikTok shows to Russian vs. Ukrainian users
— starting with new TikTok accounts using IP addresses located 50 miles apart, the difference is stark #
Elon Musk buys 9% of Twitter stock as he pressures company on “free speech”
— his Twitter poll last month now sounds ominous #
Footage of 11-year-old Prince found in archival film of 1970 Minneapolis teachers’ strike
— discovered by accident, immediately recognizable #
Taylor Lorenz on the popularity of Reddit’s Place revival
— five years later, it's seen 6x more users participating driven by communities on Twitch and Discord #
Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman making a new Monkey Island game
— coming this year, it will canonically follow Secret of Monkey Island 2 as Ron explained in his 2013 post #
On Seeing Both
— another thoughtful Hank Green rumination, a good companion to his "Is it All Hopeless?" video from a couple weeks back #
xkcd’s Instructions
— a 9-hour-long TTS audio transcription of a LOGO program that draws… something, but good luck converting it back to syntactically-correct code #
The Past and Future of Flag Emoji
— Jennifer Daniel explains why the Unicode Technical Committee is no longer accepting flag emoji proposals (via) #
Infinite Mac, an instant-booting Quadra in your browser
— system7.app and macos8.app instantly emulate Mac hardware full of software, with drag-and-drop file import/export and persistent storage #
Lumon Industries Macrodata Refiner
— all of you innies better get cracking if we're going to meet our quarterly quota #
Building Pong inside a single sprite on the Commodore 64
— on the C64, sprites were 24x21 pixel objects that can be moved over a background (via) #
Mike Masnick on how moderating content supports the principles of free speech
— a free-for-all of spam, harassment, abuse, and hate drives away people, resulting in fewer forums for speech #
Hackers are faking emergency data requests to access sensitive customer data
— compromised police email addresses were used to collect info from Discord, Apple, Instagram, Snap, and Google, among others (via) #
Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok
— another Taylor Lorenz scoop, Targeted Victory pushed the unfounded "Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge" rumor to local news #
Funomena shutting down after report on emotionally abusive founder
— a shocking and sad end to the indie studio behind Wattam and Luna #
Photorealistic 3D renders of classic TV game show sets
— David Friedman on one photographer's impressive hobby, shared only in a TV history Facebook group #
The Sound of Love
— stories of love and heartbreak found in the comments of songs uploaded to YouTube (via) #
Russians are racing to download Wikipedia before it’s banned
— the 29 GB torrent was downloaded 106k times in the first half of March, a 4,000% increase since January (via) #
Anti-war Russians find a lifeline on Clubhouse, which Russia hasn’t blocked yet
— "any time there is a wall, information finds little places to seep through" (via) #
Drug discovery AI suggests 40,000 new possible biochemical weapons in six hours
— machine-learning for finding new medicines can easily be flipped into bad actor mode (via) #
Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse
— Charlie Warzel interviews Wagner James Au about what we can learn from Second Life #
The 2,731-Person Project to Build New York City in Minecraft
— builders are collaborating to recreate NYC one neighborhood at a time (via) #
People Make Games investigates three indie studio founders accused of emotional abuse
— well-reported piece about Ken Wong (Mountains), Steve Gaynor (Fullbright), and Robin Hunicke (Funomena) #
What happened to Torah learning software TropeTrainer after the death of its creator
— S.I. Rosenbaum's remarkable story of faith, passion, and software obsolescence after death (via) #
Nilay Patel interviews Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg
— wide-ranging chat about Tumblr, Wordpress, the financial securitization of everything, and keeping the web weird #
Vimeo ordering creators to suddenly pay thousands of dollars or they’ll delete their videos
— particularly painful for creators on Patreon where it's the default video integration #
Marino Totino’s incredible miniature video store
— behind-the-scenes videos on Instagram, with more photos on her homepage #
Drop a playable Mario from Super Mario 64 into any Blender project
— people are posting fun examples on Twitter (via) #
Amateur open-source researchers went viral unpacking the war in Ukraine
— some of the OSINT happening on Twitter is incredible (via) #
The Gender Bias Inside GPT-3
— some particularly damning examples reflecting the biases of the internet that trained it (via) #
Connor Ratliff finally interviews Tom Hanks for the Dead Eyes podcast
— 30 episodes and two years later, a fascinating conversation about how and why a director makes a casting decision #
New Spline beta adds real-time collaborative 3D editing
— plus new sculpting tools, export options, template library, and a more #
DeepMind’s new AI model helps decipher, date, and locate ancient inscriptions
— if you happen to know ancient Greek, you can try DeepMind's interactive Ithaca demo #
Atari acquires MobyGames for $1.5 million
— despite their promises, this bodes very poorly for the 23-year-old database's future given Atari's track record #
Brandon Stanton’s Empire of Empathy
— fascinating profile of the Humans of New York creator and his philanthropic efforts (via) #
The Many Escapes of Justin Sun
— The Verge's new exposé on the Tron/Poloniex/BitTorrent crypto-mogul's history of sketchy financial dealings #
Kyle Orland’s taxonomy of game difficulty
— Elden Ring won't hold your hand, but its challenges can be overcome with further exploration and grinding #
Smithsonian to return Benin bronzes to Nigeria
— more museums are returning looted cultural objects to where they once belonged (via) #